> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ned Konz [mailto:ned at bike-nomad.com]
> Sent: Monday, February 10, 2003 1:48 PM
> To: The general-purpose Squeak developers list
> Subject: Re: [DOCS] Maximum Squeak - accelerating Squeak and named
> primitives.
> 
> 
> On Monday 10 February 2003 10:22 am, Tim Rowledge wrote:
> > Named Primitives - needs updating & completing. Ought to refer to
> > using VMMaker to build the plugins
> 
> I have the beginnings of an article on named primitives; would it be 
> helpful to anyone? I could upload it to the Swiki, but it's kinda 
> unfinished and it's in HTML, which makes it hard to edit. Anyone want 
> to complete it? Or is it useful as is?
> 
> http://bike-nomad.com/squeak/writingPlugins.html


Hey Ned, 

This looks like a good start and is quite humorous to boot, for myself.
Have you looked at SecureSpread?  ;-)

You wrote:

"After looking at the Spread API documentation, I see two choices for
connecting Squeak to Spread. 

One is to duplicate all the client logic in Smalltalk, down to sending
packets over the network. I could read the C or Java implementations and
duplicate them in Smalltalk. This has the advantage of not requiring a
compiled plugin, but has the serious disadvantage of being a lot of work. 

The other choice that I can see is to hook Squeak up to the Spread client
library libsp, which is written in C and is available as a static linker
library. Although this choice requires compilation of a plugin, it has the
advantage of being able to track new versions of Spread easily by a simple
re-compile. But most important for me, it looks like much less work. So this
is what I'm going to do. 
"

Well, I chose the first approach (not with Spread) and let me confirm:
"It's a LOT of work!".  However, we now have a working SPKI implementation
in squeak, so perhaps its useful still.

I am now looking at multicast/broadcast key exchange mechanisms and
SecureSpread was recommended to me.  Isn't that hilarious?  

I think that I want to implement this in squeak again, but I will probably
use the SecureSpread algorithms.  I do want to look at your SpreadPlugin.
Did you manage to get a distributed object impl working?

cheers,
rob